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Just under the water lies one of the biggest mysteries of the Great Barrier Reef: blue holes. These underwater sinkholes give researchers a rare look at ocean life and how we can protect it. Until a few years ago, only two blue holes were documented in the entirety of the Great Barrier Reef — they are hard to find and even harder to get to. 

With the help of Google Maps, marine biologist Johnny Gaskell and a team of researchers are finding previously unknown blue holes. In 2017, after witnessing Cyclone Debbie destroy many of the reefs in its path, he set out to find more blue holes. Home to hundreds of species of coral and serving as a protective waters for larger marine life, these formations give scientists a view of history buried in undisturbed sediment layers and clues about  how to better protect coral reefs. 

Using Google Maps’ satellite view, Johnny followed the cyclone’s path to pinpoint areas along the reef that might have been spared from damage. That’s when he spotted perfect circles along the reef, indicating a potential blue hole. The formation he identified was south of the Whitsundays in the Hard Line Reefs, a difficult-to-reach area of the Great Barrier Reef that’s dangerous to navigate. Despite this, Johnny and a team of divers headed out into the unknown, unsure of what — if anything — awaited them.

With the satellite view of Google Maps on their phones, they navigated their boats through narrow channels in unsurveyed waters until the blue dot on their map was directly over the blue hole. Johnny dove in and found healthy coral formations that have sat undisturbed, possibly for centuries. Along the edges were delicate birdsnest corals, vibrant giant clams and huge branching staghorn corals. In the stillness of the blue hole’s center, there were green sea turtles, giant trevally and sharks that all called the dark, cool water home. 

With the help of Google Maps, a discovery that would have taken years of underwater exploration on the seafloor is now allowing researchers to expand our understanding of the world’s largest ecosystem. Today, Johnny is still working to build a snapshot of coral reef conditions. Working with Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Reef Census project, they are using geotagged images to give everyone — from scientists to students — a better idea of what’s going in depths of the water whether they dive in or not. 

In 2021 the Great Reef Census is expanding to reach more reefs, collect more data, and broaden its research goals. To join the efforts, sign up as a Citizen or contribute directly via the project’s fundraising page. 

Our latest Feature Drop is making your Pixel smarter and more fun, while also helping you feel safer, too. From Locked Folders to expanding some features to more countries to short videos in astrophotography, there’s a lot to unpack. 

Summertime fun for Pixel

Pixel owners love using astrophotography in Night Sight to take incredible photos of the night sky, and now it’s getting even better. You can now create videos of the stars moving across the sky all during the same exposure. Once you take a photo in Night Sight, both the photo and video will be saved in your camera roll. Try waiting longer to capture even more of the stars in your video. This feature is available on Pixel 4 and newer phones and you can learn more at g.co/pixel/astrophotography.

Pride events across many parts of the world kick-off in June, and Pixel has new wallpapers and ringtones to celebrate. Three bold, joyful wallpaper designs were created exclusively for Pixel by Ashton Attzs. Check out new Pride-themed ringtones and notifications created by other LGBTQ+ artists and YouTube Creators.

More privacy, more safety

Last month at Google I/O we previewed Locked Folder in Google Photos, which is now rolling out to Pixel users. For photos and videos that need a little extra privacy — like pictures of an upcoming gift for a loved one, or screenshots of your recent receipts — you can save them to the new Locked Folder. To make it even easier to add photos and videos to Locked Folder on Pixel, you can choose to save them there straight from the camera. They’re saved on your device and won’t show up in shared albums, Memories or any other apps on your device, and can only be accessed using your device passcode or fingerprint.

The tools used by digital publishers and advertisers —  often called ad tech — help websites and apps make money and fund high-quality content. Ad tech also helps our advertising partners big and small reach customers and grow their businesses. Our ad tech tools are built to work with our partners and competitors alike — it’s why we share access to advertising data to support publisher monetization and why we provide access to more than 700 rival advertiser platforms and 80 publisher platforms across our products.

Over the past two years, we have been working with the French Competition Authority (FCA) to answer their questions about our advertising technology, and more specifically about Google Ad Manager, our publisher platform. 

While we believe we offer valuable services and compete on the merits, we are committed to working proactively with regulators everywhere to make improvements to our products. That’s why, as part of an overall resolution of the FCA’s investigation, we have agreed on a set of commitments to make it easier for publishers to make use of data and use our tools with other ad technologies. We will be testing and developing these changes over the coming months before rolling them out more broadly, including some globally. 

Increased access to data 

Today, when buyers use Google Ad Manager to participate in Google’s ad exchange, they receive equal access to data from our auctions to help them efficiently buy ad space from publishers.

As there are a lot of ad exchanges to choose from, publishers sometimes also use a technology called Header Bidding to run an auction among multiple ad exchanges. Because these Header Bidding auctions take place outside of our platform, it is usually not technically possible for Google to identify the participants, and therefore we cannot share data with those buyers. 

With these commitments, we will work to create a solution that ensures that all buyers that a publisher works with, including those who participate in Header Bidding, can receive equal access to data related to outcomes from the Ad Manager auction. In particular, we will be providing information around the “minimum bid to win” from previous auctions. 

Increased flexibility 

Publishers using Ad Manager have always had the ability to sell ads via many different advertising platforms and the ability to negotiate terms with other publisher platforms to implement business strategies targeted to specific buyers. This flexibility allows publishers and advertisers to mix and match technology partners to meet their different needs.

We will further increase the flexibility of Google Ad Manager to meet the evolving needs of our partners, including allowing them to set custom pricing rules for ads that are in sensitive categories and implementing product changes that improve interoperability between Ad Manager and third-party ad servers. Also, we are reaffirming that we will not limit Ad Manager publishers from negotiating specific terms or pricing directly with other sell-side platforms (SSPs). And we will continue to provide Ad Manager publishers with controls to include or exclude certain buyers at their discretion.

Affirming our commitment to transparency

We have worked for years to bring increased transparency to programmatic advertising, including taking steps to simplify our platforms. This includes combining our publisher ad server and ad exchange to become Google Ad Manager and shifting to a unified first price auction in Ad Manager to help reduce complexity and create a fair and transparent market for everyone.

As part of these commitments, we are reaffirming our promise not to use data from other SSPs to optimize bids in our exchange in a way that other SSPs can’t reproduce. We are also reaffirming our promise not to share any bid from any Ad Manager auction participants with any other auction participant prior to completion of the auction. Additionally, we’ll give publishers at least three months’ notice for major changes requiring significant implementation effort that publishers must adopt, unless those are related to security or privacy protections, or are required by law. 

We are always working on improving our ad tech products to help publishers fund their content and businesses and help advertisers efficiently reach customers. We recognise the role that ad tech plays in supporting access to content and information and we’re committed to working collaboratively with regulators and investing in new products and technologies that give publishers more choice and better results when using our platforms.